BUT WHAT IF THE CHEAP HOTEL HAS A REWARDS PROGRAM?

Ed. Note: Ludwig Wittgenstein was right: "Logic must take care of itself." Our bizarre series from the emailing clerical messenger concludes with this other-worldly, logic-bending, dreamscape excursus on (1) the pesthouse’s determined efforts to steer clear of demimondaines and (2) the eerie effects of the absence of control exercised by reason.

Oh, where is André Breton when you need him!

And then every once in a while we hear something else weird. The latest thing is that [two Russian seminarians] wanted to spend Easter vacation in New York City, but [the rector] would not let them because they could only afford to stay in a cheap hotel, and [the rector] said that if they stayed at a cheap hotel, people would think they were there to meet a prostitute. I didn’t hear what [the rector] said directly; I only heard what [Scut the Prefect] told us, and he tends to misunderstand and exaggerate things that [the rector] says. So I don’t know which of them said this, but [Scut the Prefect] said a priest cannot stay at a regular hotel; he can only stay at a very expensive hotel costing at least $100 a night, because if he goes to a regular hotel people will think he’s there to meet a prostitute.

Calling upon all his pesthouse logic chopping skills and powers of inference and discursive reasoning, our priestly correspondent demolishes his superiors’ artful theses:

Well, that’s about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. He also said a priest could not stay at just a regular hotel off of highway 75, for example between here and Cincinnati, for the same reason. I realize that there are very low hotels in bad parts of town, where prostitutes are walking all over the place, and where they charge you for the number of hours you stay there instead of by the night — those places are places of sin, and a priest shouldn’t stay at a place like that at all. But to say that every cheap hotel — even those places off of highway 75 that are just there for the people traveling up and down the freeway to spend the night in — are places of prostitution, is completely crazy.

Unsure that logic applies in this situation, our exasperated and unwilling epistolary informant first essays an introspective Socratic method (of sorts), staggers in the absence of synthesis, and limpingly clings to an analogy to convince himself that the pesthouse nomenklatura is as wrong as Siamese triplets on a one-wheeled bicycle.

And why is a priest safer in an expensive hotel? Do people NEVER have prostitutes in expensive hotels? I just don’t know what to think. More than 90% of the people who stay at a hotel are just there because they’re traveling a long ways, and they need to stop for the night. To say that people would think a priest is meeting a prostitute at a hotel, unless he goes to a very expensive hotel, is like saying a priest shouldn’t go into a bookstore because people will think he is there to buy bad books.

Ed Note: A dialectical effort worthy of Peter of Spain, that’s for sure! We hope Scotty beams our messenger back up to reality: There’s no intelligent life in the swampland (or at the SW Ohio cult center, for that matter). Not much of a chance for that, however. He’s been packed off to a Seattle gulag, probably for re-education, where he may have a chance to read and think about what he wrote in 2009.

Both the messenger and his new minder share the same opinions about the pesthouse, the rector, Scut, and the SW Ohio cult masters. The difference is, the minder was nastier but never put it in writing. He got his dose of therapy by shooting off his mouth to the laity. He also had the good sense to get out on his own. Now all he has to do is come wagging his tail when they occasionally whistle. Otherwise, he's got the backyard all to himself, so all strays are welcome -- under certain conditions...